What is the oldest PC you consider still useful?

[LukeSavenije]

I mean... a singlecore with 1 gigs of ram can run windows 10

 

I'm not saying it's well usable, but it's possible

[aaradorn]

I'd say, atleast 2 cores and 4gb of ram. If its just average pc stuff. 

[Columbo]

2 hours ago, dgsddfgdfhgs said:

i5 2500 is the best intel has ever made and still so relevant.

worth costing me $50 to revive the dead mobo to keep it running

 

I bought an old Dell with an i5 2400 and 4GB of ram for $70. Runs win7 and I added 8GB of ram and put in a 128GB SSD and a 1TB spinner drive last year. 

[Ithanul]

16 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

By contrast we have core i7-6700k, 16GB DDR4 systems....

 

 

...coupled with 5400 RPM spinners.

Just shoot me

Ouch.  It is something how an quality SSD can revive a platform and get a few more years out of it.

The refresh is going to be a nice boost for our system.

[Automobili3XF]

My old computer at the job impressed me quite a bit.

Pentium E6700 on a G41 motherboard, 4gbs of RAM, a 320gb WD Blue hard drive and it still ran Windows 10 x64 rather well, it choked a bit with browser like Vivaldi with too many tabs but others like Firefox were totally fine with it.

[FadedCrown]

Slowest I can use is the 9900K. No exceptions.

[iLostMyXbox21]

Look in My sig, that’s my current rig

 

 

 

heyyyyy that rhymes

[mediagiant]

The oldest Linux PC that wouldn't be so slow to frustrate me would be:

Core 2 Duo

4 GB RAM

32 GB SATA SSD

 

For Windows 10 or 11, I would want a 128 GB SSD, 8 GB of RAM, and an early Core i3. At a minimum. 

 

I loathe spinning hard drives and anything less than 4 GB of RAM for web browsing...although Linux is far less of a resource hog. 8 GB doesn't feel like enough at times in Windows.

 

Gaming is a whole separate issue because it really depends on what game you're playing.

 

 

[Mark Kaine]

Everything below 

386?

 

i don't understand the question i guess?

On 2/11/2019 at 5:25 PM, Radium_Angel said:

Gaming aside...

 

Yep, i don't understand the question  

 

 

edit: wow holy necro batman! 

[Zodiark1593]

The work PCs take about as much time to respond, as it took for this thread to get reanimated. 
 

Not that it’s my time, I get paid regardless, but I wonder if the idiots speccing out the hardware are aware that waiting on PCs (at least 10 minutes to go from button press, to opening the email), costs legitimate and tangible company time. 

[brownrock898]

I daily drive a Dell T3500 workstation, X58 . The only thing I can't really "do" is of course play modern AAA titles. I play GTA5Online on it and with a 750ti I get well above 30fps. I'm going to keep upgrading it for now.

I went from a Xeon X5660 to an X5687, two fewer cores but it's the highest clocked 1st Gen Xeon

[Beerzerker]

The term "Useful" is relative to the user.
If it still does what you want it to do to your satisfaction then it's still useful, regardless of age.

The real question is do you want something newer that can do things better/faster or not.

[atxcyclist]

Ivy Bridge and AMD FX stuff can still surf the web competently and do some light gaming, I’d probably draw the line somewhere around there. But that’s just for basic things. Personally, my uses for machines tend to be more intensive, so I try to run things much more modern.

[HAL90000]

On 2/11/2019 at 11:25 AM, Radium_Angel said:

Gaming aside...

daily usage tasks. What do you consider "too old" to be useful?

 

 

Somewhere in the UK there is a campground that has been run by an Atari ST since 1985 or so.

[DJboutit]

IMO 4 gen I7 like 4970 4970k or I5 6th gen like 6700k

 

For decent gaming for games that came out 2010 to 2014 I would say min should be like I7 8700 8700k and 1660 TI or 980 TI

 

 

[Seccedonien]

It all depends on what I need it to do and how much power it uses. Like I still have a AMD FX-8350 based machine doing nothing for the past couple of years that I've been tempted to use as a server but it's power use is just too high in my opinion to have the odd game server and Plex like machine running on it since it would be a bonus to do those things but I don't miss it when I don't have that running.

 

Currently the only PC I have running next to my gaming PC is my former gaming PC to encode my streams and do some video editing on.

[da na]

On 6/25/2023 at 2:33 PM, mediagiant said:

The oldest Linux PC that wouldn't be so slow to frustrate me would be:

Core 2 Duo

4 GB RAM

32 GB SATA SSD

 

For Windows 10 or 11, I would want a 128 GB SSD, 8 GB of RAM, and an early Core i3. At a minimum. 

 

I loathe spinning hard drives and anything less than 4 GB of RAM for web browsing...although Linux is far less of a resource hog. 8 GB doesn't feel like enough at times in Windows.

 

Gaming is a whole separate issue because it really depends on what game you're playing.

 

 

Early Core i3s are slower than most Core 2 Duos, in fact

[da na]

I have a rather large collection of old laptops. Quite a ton, mostly of the Centrino 2 era. I find even the 1.6ghz Core 2 Duo mobile chips run Windows 10 surprisingly well. All of these machines have 4GB of DDR2 or 6GB of DDR3, fresh batteries, 128GB SSDs and Windows 10 Pro. I don't own any laptops from the past decade since these fulfill my needs so well, in fact. The 1.6ghz Core 2 Duos still will do web browsing and etc., but the one mobile Core 2 Quad I have is still astoundingly fast. It beats many 1st-4th gen i3s, i5s I've benchmarked, in fact.

 

Desktop Pentium 4 on the 775 socket and laptop Core 2 Duo is where I would draw the usability line. I have one laptop with an earlier 32-bit Core Duo 1.86ghz, it struggles with basic tasks in Windows 10 and the iGPU is too old to support hardware acceleration, burdening the CPU further. Turion 64 x2, AMD's pathetic competition to the Core 2 Duo, is also unusable IMO. The fastest 2GHZ model struggles to keep up with a 1.6ghz Core 2 Duo while consuming 2x the power, and the graphics on their chipsets ran at EIGHT MHZ making the Start menu laggy as hell.

 

Edit: Oooooh holy necro

[da na]

18 hours ago, brownrock898 said:

I daily drive a Dell T3500 workstation, X58 . The only thing I can't really "do" is of course play modern AAA titles. I play GTA5Online on it and with a 750ti I get well above 30fps. I'm going to keep upgrading it for now.

I went from a Xeon X5660 to an X5687, two fewer cores but it's the highest clocked 1st Gen Xeon

Awesome platform, I've got two servers on the X58 chipset. They hold up... alright. Definitely haven't aged as gracefully as X99/C600 but they'll still crank out some renders at the expense of 600w.

[r00tb33r]

Depends.  In the year 2000 I was given a donated 486DX4.  I played Doom on it and programmed in QuickBasic.  It was useful to the 12-year-old me.

 

If I was on a desert island and lost my i9, I would totally spend my last days on the same old 486 just playing Doom.

 

Otherwise the computer this post is made from is a X58 system, and that was released in 2008.  I use this every day, I remotely connect to it from work to do personal stuff.  I now have a W3680 processor in it, but it's not that much more than what it started with.

[da na]

4 minutes ago, r00tb33r said:

Depends.  In the year 2000 I was given a donated 486DX4.  I played Doom on it and programmed in QuickBasic.  It was useful to the 12-year-old me.

 

If I was on a desert island and lost my i9, I would totally spend my last days on the same old 486 just playing Doom.

 

Otherwise the computer this post is made from is a X58 system, and that was released in 2008.  I use this every day, I remotely connect to it from work to do personal stuff.  I now have a W3680 processor in it, but it's not that much more than what it started with.

I learned how to program at 6 years old on a Commodore 64, when the system was already over 2 decades old. It was a wonderful system to start on.

[aisle9]

I'm using a vintage 2007 ThinkPad X61T with a low-clocked Core 2 Duo and 4GB of RAM as a glorified typewriter that happens to be running Windows 10. On the rare occasion that I do want to do something other than Word with it, the lack of RAM is a bigger problem than the CPU...hence why I have a 4GB stick of laptop DDR2 on the way.

 

On 2/11/2019 at 5:47 PM, Radium_Angel said:

By contrast we have core i7-6700k, 16GB DDR4 systems....

...coupled with 5400 RPM spinners.

Just shoot me

Your company is so evil that Comcast recoils in fear at its name.

 

On 2/12/2019 at 10:59 AM, FadedCrown said:

Slowest I can use is the 9900K. No exceptions.

Obvious troll is obvious.

[OU812]

My HTPC was a i7 2600 with a ssd, spinning hdd and 20g of random ram I had laying around. Coupled with a 1650 low profile because it was a low pro dell, thing ran pretty good even with win 11.

[Issac Zachary]

Gaming: Any PC.

Word Processing: Any PC

Use for the internet (with Windows 10): Most PC's from about 2004 onwards.

[Zodiark1593]

4 hours ago, DJboutit said:

IMO 4 gen I7 like 4970 4970k or I5 6th gen like 6700k

 

For decent gaming for games that came out 2010 to 2014 I would say min should be like I7 8700 8700k and 1660 TI or 980 TI

 

 

For games that came out in 2014, you recommend a CPU that came out in 2017? You're definitely smoking something, but it isn't particularly good stuff.